Past Exhibitions

Exhibitions & Events

Past Exhibitions

2017

A Miscellany of Marvels: New Acquisitions at the RBML
August 14 – September 15 2017
What do horses, board games, and volcanoes have in common? They are all featured in the RBML’s summer exhibition showcasing new and notable acquisitions. This exhibition also serves to introduce RBML’s brand new exhibition space—the Ellen and Nirmal Chatterjee Exhibition Gallery. Our new dedicated exhibition space features state-of-the-art cases, a modern and clean aesthetic, and endless possibilities. Many thanks to the Chatterjees for their generous donation that made this space possible.

2016

No writer is more renowned for his ability to anticipate the future than H. G. Wells. His writing foresaw the aeroplane, the tank, space travel, the atomic bomb and the worldwide web; his fantastic fiction imagined time travel, flights to the moon, alien invasion and human beings with the powers of gods.

Wells’s political writing argued for an end to war through the creation of a World State; at the height of his fame Wells was one of the world’s most significant public intellectuals, and, towards the end of his career, he became increasingly interested in universal human rights.

Celebrating the 500th anniversary of Erasmus’ New Testament, this exhibition was curated by the former Director of the University of Illinois Press, Willis Goth Regier, and features the major works of Erasmus’s long career, including the two most important editions of his New Testament, those from 1516 and 1519. Erasmus’ contemporaries called him the best of teachers, the prince of humanists, and the most learned of men. His first edition of the Greek New Testament, published 500 years ago this year, changed Christianity forever. Martin Luther used it for his German translation and William Tyndall used it for his English version. Indeed, the text had an enormous impact on Biblical scholarship in general.

In this exhibit, we explore the fictional Shakespeare by character type through works that span four hundred years. Shakespeare appears in the works of such authors as Ben Jonson, John Milton, Rudyard Kipling, George Bernard Shaw, Mark Twain, Isaac Asimov, Jorge Luis Borges, and Neil Gaiman, among many others. By exploring Shakespeare as a character, we hope to make him live again in the realm of fiction during this year that commemorates the 400th anniversary of his death.